Angular 4 Is Out Now!! Should You Switch From Angular 2?

From our last blog, you already know that Angular 4 was going to release in March 2017. On 23rd, Google’s Angular team finally announced the release of version 4 skipping the 3rd one. As the long awaited release of Angular 2 was a complete makeover of previous version, this time they have kept it less surprising and similar to version 2.

This means, Angular 4 has a gentle learning curve. However, for those developers who are still in the learning phase of Angular 2, it can be a little difficult to switch to the newer one. Hence, let’s first see what this new version has to offer and then discuss about switching.

What’s New In Angular 4

As compared to Angular 2, there are many new things added to the list. Not only new features but also some tweaks are there that enhance old features.

Faster & Smaller

With Angular 4, applications are going to be less space consuming and faster than before. However, by no means they are done yet, and the team is focused on making further improvements in the up-coming months.

View Engine

They’ve made changes under to hood to what AOT generated code looks like. These changes reduce the size of the generated code for the components by around 60% in most cases. The more complex the templates are, the higher the savings.
During the release candidate period, many software developers who migrated to Angular 4 reduced their production bundles by hundreds of kilobytes.

Animation Package

They have pulled animations out of @angular/core and put into their own package. This means that if you don’t use animations, this extra code will not end up in your production bundles.
This change also allows you to more easily find documentation and to take better advantage of auto-completion. You can add animations yourself to your main NgModule by importing BrowserAnimationsModule from @angular/platform-browser/animations.

New Features

Improved *ngIf and *ngFor

The template binding syntax now supports a couple helpful changes. You can now use an if/else style syntax, and assign local variables such as when unrolling an observable.
<div *ngIf=”userList | async as users; else loading”>
<user-profile *ngFor=”let user of users; count as count” [user]=”user”>
</user-profile>
<div>{{count}} total users</div>
</div>
<ng-template #loading>Loading…</ng-template>

Angular Universal

Universal, the project that allows developers to run Angular on a server, is now up to date with Angular again, and this is the first release since Universal, originally a community-driven project, was adopted by the Angular team. This release now includes the results of the internal and external work from the Universal team over the last few months. The majority of the Universal code is now located in @angular/platform-server.

To learn more about taking advantage of Angular Universal, take a look at the new renderModuleFactory method in @angular/platform-server, or Rob Wormald’s Demo Repository. More documentation and code samples are going to come.

The bottom line

If you have watched the video, you might have understood that it would not be hard to switch to Angular 4. However, If you are still not very comfortable with Angular 2 then it can be a little difficult for you. In that case ValueCoder‘s expert advice would be to wait for some more months and then grab it as there are still 6 months remaining before Angular 5 comes.

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